Journalist / Broadcaster

High-School

College Launches Choose Respect Program What does it feel like to live in a community?

Do you feel safe in your community? Do you feel respected? Can you walk along the streets of Ellenbrook, walk around our school, sit in our classrooms and honestly say “I am proud of what I see and what I am a part of.”?

These are some of the questions being asked at Ellenbrook Secondary College. Choose Respect is a program that is being introduced to Ellenbrook Secondary College with hopes to create a more respectful community within the school.

This is the first article I ever wrote. I was a year 10 high-school student going into year 11 and wanting to show my eagerness for journalism. The school I went to, Ellenbrook Secondary College is a public school, that is relatively new and had many areas that could improve upon. One of which was the respect shown to peers, by peers, as well as the respect shown by peers to teachers. I am a firm believe in being a respectful student and individual as a whole. So I took it upon myself to do the research into the Choose Respect program which had already been introduced into a larger community, and spoke to teachers about what they thought of the program.

This article escalated into actually implementing the program into the school system. Because of my eager attitude I was able to use this to help me achieve the head boy position at the school in year 12, and make changes that are still in place now, 2-3 years later.

The article as a whole represents my ability to follow journalistic style from the beginning, while it may not be as concise as it could be, it was still a good effort at a piece of writing I had never experienced before. It also allowed me to interview teachers and students for the first time. The whole process excited me, and I continued to write articles for the newsletter, improving under the teaching of Ryan Platten, who was the Applied Information Technology teacher, as well as someone who worked as a journalist for a country paper in Broome.